(1997 est. pop. 105 million). Manchuria, the region of northeastern China comprising the provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning (Fengtian), is referred to as Dongbei ("Northeast") in China. This Chinese terminology is part of a larger effort to distance the region's history from the colonial overtures associated with the term "Manchuria," the nomenclature of which was partly the creation of Russian and Japanese imperialists who hoped that the name would imply the region's separateness from the rest of China. Originally peopled by a number of tribal groups, the largest of whom were Mongols, Tungus, and Manchus, Manchuria is rich in natural resources, including coal, iron, timber and forest products, furs, and ginseng. During the twentieth century, Manchuria's transportation infrastructure and industrial base were developed by foreign occupiers and later by Chinese administrators. Today the region, bordered to the southeast by Korea and to the north and northeast by Russia, is one of the most important industrial heart-lands in the People's Republic of China.
The presence of Han Chinese in Manchuria can be traced back to the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE) when a prefecture was established on the Liaodong Peninsula at the southernmost point of Liaoning Province. It was during the reign of the fifth Han emperor, Wu Di (reigned 140–87 BCE), that a more significant Chinese presence was established when Wu Di encouraged the settlement of Chinese both on the Liaodong Peninsula and in an area of what is today western Liaoning in order to strengthen the northern borders against the Xiongnu peoples. For much of China's imperial past, however, there was only a minimal presence of Chinese in this region that lay beyond the northeast border of the Great Wall. After their conquest of China in the mid-seventeenth century, the Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) sought to preserve Manchuria as an undeveloped ancestral homeland, and the early emperors, including Shunzhi (1638–1661), Kangxi (1654–1722), Yongzheng (1678–1735), and Qianlong (1711–1799), all issued edicts, of dubious effectiveness, forbidding the settlement of Chinese in the region.
Russian Annexation Feared
With the growing Russian presence in the Far East in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Qing emperors grew to fear Russian annexation of Manchuria more than the presence of Chinese settlers. The last of the old edicts were repealed, and northern Chinese were encouraged to settle in Manchuria. The arrival of British and French warships off the coast of southern Manchuria during the Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century had also alerted the Manchus that the region had strategic importance and that the development of its population and fortifications was required. These belated efforts by the Qing rulers were ineffective, and by the 1890s Manchuria was largely lost to foreign imperialists, first Russian and then Japanese.
In 1896, following the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), the Qing rulers, now more fearful of Tokyo's colonial ambitions than Russia's, granted permission to czarist Russia to build the Chinese Eastern Railway across Manchuria as a shortcut and alternative route to the Trans-Siberian Railway. In 1898, Russia secured further concessions from a weakening Manchu court, including a twenty-five-year lease of the southern portion of the Liaodong Peninsula and the right to construct an additional southern route to the region's railway that would have the added benefit of having a year-round ice-free port as its terminus in the new leasehold. Following the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), the new Russian rights in southern Manchuria, along with the region's railway and harbors at Lushun (Port Arthur) and Dalian (Dairen in Japanese and Dalny in Russian), were transferred to Japanese control.
Manchuria as a Japanese Colony
The new Japanese governors in southern Manchuria continued to build on the original Russian plans, and their new colony blossomed during the soybean boom of the late 1910s. By the late 1920s, tension was building as Japanese colonial ambitions in Manchuria could no longer be satisfied by a small leasehold on the Liaodong Peninsula and the attempts by commanders in the local Japanese garrison force, the Guandong (Kwantung) Army, to manipulate the region's de facto ruler, the warlord Zhang Zuolin (Chang Tso-lin). On 18 September 1931, the Guandong Army launched an invasion of Manchuria. The following year, the birth of a new "independent" nation of Manchukuo ("Country of the Manchus") was proclaimed. The reality was that Manchukuo was a creation of the Japanese military and a puppet state with no real independence. Until the end of the Pacific War, Manchuria remained under Japanese occupation, supplying raw materials to the home islands and playing an important role in the creation of Japan's colonial ideology. Manchuria was viewed by many Japanese not only as a strategic buffer zone between their empire and the Soviet Union but also as a colonial frontier, even a potential utopia, awaiting the arrival of brave Japanese settlers who would develop the region's untapped potential.
Following Japan's surrender in 1945, the Russians returned to Manchuria. Having secured the restoration of Russia's former rights in the region at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 in return for a promise to enter the war against Japan, Soviet troops invaded the region in the final days of the Pacific War. Over the next couple of years, the Russians plundered the region, dismantling factories and sending them in pieces back to the Soviet Union on railcars. Because of its industrial capacity and abundant natural resources, Manchuria was a hotly contested territory during the Chinese Civil War (1947–1949) between the Communists and Nationalists.
Since the 1950s, Manchuria has been developed as China's industrial heartland. The steel mills at Anshan, the Fushun colliery, the giant factory complexes in the industrial cities of Shenyang (Mukden) and Changchun, and the commercial port of Dalian played important roles in the industrialization strategies of the Communist regime. With the move to create a market economy in China in the late 1980s and early 1990s, industrial Manchuria began to experience new challenges. Many of the inefficient state-owned enterprises either closed or severely downsized their workforces. One of the results was a high level of unemployment in a region that had traditionally been prosperous under the old state-planned economy. Decades of industrialization have also created serious environmental problems in China's Northeast, including high rates of respiratory diseases among its populace and high levels of toxins in its rivers and waterways. The former pristine reserve of the Manchus is now polluted and home to tens of millions of Han Chinese factory workers.
Further Reading
Chao, Kang. (1982) The Economic Development of Manchuria:The Rise of a Frontier Economy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, Center for Chinese Studies.
Elliott, Mark C. (2000) "The Limits of Tartary: Manchuria in Imperial and National Geographies." The Journal of Asian Studies 59, 3 (August): 603–646.
Hosie, Alexander. ([1904] 1980) Manchuria, Its People, Resources, and Recent History. Reprint ed. New York: Garland Publishing.
Janhunen, Juha. (1996) Manchuria: An Ethnic History. Helsinki, Finland: Finno-Ugrian Society.
Lattimore, Owen. (1935) Manchuria: Cradle of Conflict. New York: Macmillan.
Young, Louise. (1999) Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
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